Rubik Poised With Another Puzzle To Stump The World

November 9, 1986|By ROBERT CROSS, Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- In the beginning was the Cube, and after Erno Rubik put his name on it, he sold 100 million of them in the first three years of this decade. Patent pirates, knockoff artists and other plastic bandits of the manufacturing underworld sold another 50 million.

The famous puzzle proved to be a fine metaphor for the first part of this decade. Still shaking ourselves out of our `70s torpor, we could put our hands around a Rubik`s Cube and try to twist and turn its 26 cubes-within-the-Cube until the colors matched on all six sides.

That was difficult, of course, just as it was difficult to forget Watergate or to liberate hostages. Fittingly, perhaps, precious petroleum went into the Cube`s manufacture. And it offered a choice of configurations more staggering than the national debt: 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 to be exact. That`s roughly 43 quintillion ways to screw up, a futility potential exceeded not even by the Nixon and Carter administrations.

Erno Rubik stuffed a lot of Christmas stockings with frustration in the early `80s. Because of the personal wealth his Cube produced, Rubik also rose to a somewhat unusual status in his native Budapest, Hungary. He was -- and remains -- an Eastern bloc multimillionaire, an Iron Curtain capitalist, a Daddy Warbucks in the land of Lenin.

After the craze subsided, Rubik returned to his regular job as an instructor of architecture and design at the Budapest Academy of Applied Arts. The job had paid $200 a month when he left it to promote the Cube. By the time he returned to Hungary, he was making $30,000 a month from royalties, and his teaching salary became academic.

Now he is back again with another amusement, a $10 toy called Rubik`s Magic, which is a flat arrangement of eight plastic squares joined by a complicated arrangement of plastic filaments, or hinges, that permit the squares to be folded and flopped at 45 different angles. The squares are decorated with rainbow-hued rings, and the object, this time, is to make the rings form a chain. The bad news: When one ring is placed in position, others also move. The good news: Players can form new and surprising geometric shapes as they struggle along.

``The puzzle is something like a tanagram, a very old toy from the Far East,`` Rubik said. ``A tanagram is a square divided into five triangles, a square and a rhomboid, and you can arrange the shapes to form different kinds of shadow pictures. Rubik`s Magic is somewhat like that, but in three dimensions.

``The most exciting thing for me is structures. Nature itself is a structure, a complicated one. It contains elements, and they are connected. Rubik`s Magic is a special construction. All the pieces are jointed. You can open it a different way than you close it. See? I close it here this way, and I open it this way. This I am able to do all the time.``

As he talked in his enigmatic accent, Rubik flipped the squares and formed the outline of a fish, an A-frame structure, a miniature bench and ... a cube.

``One of the things I`m interested in most is applying new types of constructions,`` he said. ``New possibilities. Special effects. To make possible what seems impossible.``

Rubik, the 42-year-old son and namesake of a noted Hungarian designer of gliders, is the fulfillment of a press agent`s dream. Strangers might size him up as an exceptionally bright, small man with sandy hair and sharp features. But nooo. His publicity people, working on behalf of Matchbook International Inc., the Hong Kong-based manufacturer of Rubik`s Magic, insist the inventor is ``a cross between Julio Iglesias and Carl Sagan,`` a ``quirky, creative genius`` whose wardrobe (white sweater and tailored slacks that day) ``is more Miami Vice than Iron Curtain.``

Ten years ago, Rubik was a humble architecture instructor with only a few house designs to his credit. He devised the Cube as a way to show his students the principles of algebraic group theory, and the puzzle proved so enchanting he took the idea to Konsumex, the state trading company. Konsumex introduced it to the small (population 10 million) Hungarian market in 1977 and sold two million Cubes within five years. Ideal Toy Co. brought the cube to the rest of the world, making Rubik -- and several copycats -- instant millionaires.

``At that time, the problem was that nobody was prepared for such a success,`` Rubik said. ``It was a surprise not just for me but for the toy market, the sellers, the buyers, for everyone. It was a real big explosion, and if you are not prepared for that, you get troubles. Many manufacturers made illegal knockoffs. Today we are prepared to stop those activities. We have a very strong legal position. Magic is patented worldwide, and Matchbox is able to manufacture it in satisfactory quantities for market needs. I can say we are ready for success.``